William James once said that “the natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things”. He was right. Mind-wandering is pervasive, occupying up to half of our waking thoughts. Yet for centuries, scientists largely ignored attention’s “natural tendency to wander,” deeming it too frivolous for serious study. Then 21st century scientists suddenly began to publish thousands of articles on mind-wandering, emboldened by new methods in psychology and neuroscience. This research gained so much traction within academia and the popular press that some scholars called this “the era of the wandering mind”.

Yet this flurry of progress was not tethered to philosophical foundations. Cognitive scientists gathered a vast amount of data on mind-wandering without pausing to ask foundational questions: What is mind-wandering? Is mind-wandering something that happens to us or something we do? Is mind-wandering valuable? In The Wandering Mind, I aim to answer these questions, developing the most extensive philosophical theory of mind-wandering to date.

Answering such questions is important, but beyond them I aim to show that mind-wandering gives us a novel window on the mind. Part one uses mind-wandering to motivate a new, explanatorily-powerful taxonomy of attention and mental action. Part two turns to the psychology of distraction, extracting its philosophical implications about mental passivity. Part three draws on this work to intervene in an emerging literature on the norms of attention, which neglects the value of distraction. Our philosophies of mind and the good mental life will be incomplete, until we account for how the mind wanders.

Action theorists widely hold that *guidance* separates action from mere behaviour. Yet we haven't appreciated that there are *two* basic kinds of action guidance and therefore two basic kinds of action. Guidance mechanisms impose *completion conditions* on actions like running a race or searching for your keys. Such actions are therefore *telic*: they are guided towards an endpoint and are then complete. In contrast, guidance mechanisms set no completion conditions for actions like running around or looking at a mountain vista. Such actions are therefore *atelic*: they unfold for some arbitrary time, until the agent is interrupted or moves on. My paper develops a novel theory of the distinction between telic and atelic action guidance. I then show how this distinction has implications for core topics in action theory including the normativity, satisfaction conditions, experiential character, and quantification of actions.

Obsessive thinking is a problem case for the philosophy of mental action, insofar as it both (1) feels passive but (2) manifests our agency. Our solution to this “Puzzle of Obsessive Action” rests on a fundamental distinction between what we call “occurrent” and “aggregative” agency. Occurrent agency reflects the agent’s capacity to guide her current behavior and thoughts as they unfold over time. We argue that obsessive thinking is a form of occurrent mental agency, since the agent’s attention is guided at the personal level, endorsed, and resistible. Our paper’s first contribution is therefore to argue for the heterodox views that obsessive thinking is active and, therefore, that action can be grounded in affect. Why, then, do obsessive thoughts feel passive? We argue that this is because they undermine aggregative agency. Aggregative agency reflects the agent’s capacity to organize and distribute her actions over time. Although each episode of obsessive thinking is guided, the sheer frequency of those episodes undermines the agent's ability to organize her mental actions. Obsessive thinking is therefore occurrently active but aggregatively passive. Our paper’s second contribution is therefore to use obsessive thinking as a wedge to pry these forms of agency apart.

Please contact Aaron Glasser and/or me if you would like a copy of this paper.

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have reached the consensus that one can use two different kinds of regulation to achieve self-control. Synchronic regulation uses willpower to resist current temptation. Diachronic regulation implements a plan to avoid future temptation. Yet this consensus may rest on contaminated intuitions. Specifically, agents typically use willpower (synchronic regulation) to achieve their plans to avoid temptation (diachronic regulation). So even if cases of diachronic regulation seem to involve self-control, this may be because they are contaminated by synchronic regulation. We therefore developed a novel multifactorial method to disentangle synchronic and diachronic regulation. Using this method, we find that ordinary usage assumes that only synchronic––not diachronic––regulation counts as self-control. We find this pattern across four experiments involving different kinds of temptation, as well as a paradigmatic case of diachronic regulation based on the classic story of Odysseus and the Sirens. Our final experiment finds that self-control in a diachronic case depends on whether the agent uses synchronic regulation at two moments: when she (1) initiates and (2) follows-through on a plan to resist temptation. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that synchronic regulation is the sole difference maker in the folk concept of self-control.

Perhaps the central question in philosophy of action is this: what ingredient(s) of bodily action are missing in mere behavior? But what is an analogous question for mental action? I ask this: what ingredient(s) of active, goal-directed thought are missing in mind-wandering? I argue that the missing ingredient is guidance. My unique starting point motivates unified new accounts of four central features of mental action. First is the causal basis of mental action. Mind-wandering allows us to tease apart two causes of mental action: guidance and motivation. Second is the experiential character of mental action. Goals are rarely objects of awareness; rather, goals are “phenomenological frames” that carve experience into felt distractions and relevant information. Third is the scope of mental action: intentional mind-wandering involves a unique form of “meta-control,” wherein one is actively passive. Fourth is the reality of mental action: I offer a novel response to mental action skeptics such as Strawson.

Philosophers have long been fascinated by the stream of consciousness – thoughts, images, and bits of inner speech that dance across the inner stage. Yet for centuries, such 'mind-wandering' was deemed private and thus resistant to empirical investigation. Recent developments in psychology and neuroscience have reinvigorated scientific interest in the stream of thought. Despite this flurry of progress, scientists have stressed that mind-wandering research requires firmer philosophical foundations. The time is therefore ripe for the philosophy of mind-wandering. Our review begins with a foundational question: What is mind-wandering? We then investigate the significance of mind-wandering for general philosophical topics, namely, mental action, introspection, and the norms of thinking and attention.

Although mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts, it is seldom discussed in philosophy. My paper brings these neglected thoughts into focus. I propose that mind-wandering is unguided attention. Guidance in my sense concerns how attention is monitored and regulated as it unfolds over time. Roughly speaking, someone’s attention is guided if she would feel pulled back, were she distracted from her current focus. Because our wandering thoughts drift unchecked from topic to topic, they are unguided. One motivation for my theory is what I call the "Puzzle of the Purposeful Wanderer". On the one hand, mind-wandering seems essentially purposeless; almost by definition, it contrasts with goal-directed cogni- tion. On the other hand, empirical evidence suggests that our minds frequently wander to our goals. My solution to the puzzle is this: mind-wandering is purposeless in one way––it is unguided––but purposeful in another––it is frequently caused, and thus motivated, by our goals. Another motivation for my theory is to distinguish mind-wandering from two antithetical forms of cognition: absorption (e.g. engrossment in an intellectual idea) and rumination (e.g. fixation on one’s distress). Surprisingly, previous theories cannot capture these distinctions. I can: on my view, absorption and rumination are guided, whereas mind-wandering is not. My paper has four parts. Section 1 spells out the puzzle. Sections 2 and 3 explicate two extant views of mind-wandering––the first held by most cognitive scientists, the second by Thomas Metzinger. Section 4 uses the limitations of these theories to motivate my own: mind-wandering is unguided attention.